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“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... He was the Venezuelan rich kid straight out of the Kensington crammer his mother sent him to – Carol Thatcher went there too. ‘He is not as clever as he thinks or imagines,’ one end of term report noted. ‘He talks far too loudly and too long.’ Olivier Leurent, who headed the panel of seven judges, meticulously observed the prisoner’s right ...”

“... information, at least some of which was demonstrably true. His central claim was that the Thatcher government favoured the Fayed bid largely because of the brothers’ connections with the Sultan of Brunei, and that the Fayeds’ claims were accepted without the most elementary inquiries. The Fayeds’ bid, backed by merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson ...”

“... Many of the old retainers were underemployed and keen to go, but some younger people – including Carol Thatcher – were forced out as well. The dismissal of the Premier’s daughter caused a rift with her mother (whom Black idolised) which lasted until Mrs Thatcher’s ejection from Downing Street five years ...”

“... any one of these could be a topic. When he achieved his first, long wished-for meeting with Mrs Thatcher, Black took the opportunity to lecture her on her place in British history, with special reference to Pitt and Disraeli. When he had lunch with Prince Charles, a mention of the prince’s vegetarianism had him expounding on the eating habits of British ...”

“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... There is a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him was that he would sometimes introduce himself as ‘charmless Mark’, was – is – doted on by ‘Mummy’, in whose eyes he could do no wrong and who insisted, against all the evidence, that he was a ‘born businessman ...”

“... into the fire, he waggled his stocking-soled feet, and blew out his lips. ‘I think Margaret Thatcher saw those guaranteed prices farmers were getting and just hated it,’ he said, ‘and now, though it kills me, we may have to face something: there are too many sheep in the economy. Farmers go down to the market every other week and sell one sheep, and ...”

“... especially when the subject is a woman. In a review of a book about Jean Stafford in 1988, Joyce Carol Oates declared her disgust with ‘pathography’, a narrative focused on dysfunction, breakdown, addiction and disaster, rather than on the mysterious process whereby artists spin their dirty straw into gold. Writing about the Sylvia Plath industry in The ...”

“... anarchists, libertarians, hippies, yippies, radical psychiatrists, religious cultists . . . Carol Diethe believes that Nietzsche’s name still needs clearing. As a founder of something called the British Friedrich Nietzsche Foundation (I couldn’t find it on the Web), she presents this biography of Elisabeth Nietzsche as a condemnation of the actions ...”

“... will look out for their sisters has now faced two rather spectacular counter-examples in Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. It is far from obvious why we should expect women in power to practise a different or more feminist politics. Feminists have long been sceptical, with good reason, of essentialist claims about women, which have traditionally served to ...”

“... point at the time, and later paid me back handsomely with a superb introduction to Margaret Thatcher, so I was depressed to find great tranches of his memoir taken up with pseudo-nostalgic poppycock about the virtues of white supremacy in Africa and elsewhere. The problem with his ridiculous and often hateful opinions – on Suez, on Vietnam, on ...”

“... tact, her openness about her fantasies and prejudices (although a leftist, she preferred Margaret Thatcher to the usual feminist bunch). Or the ethico-political grounds – already, in 1954, she was describing the US as a ‘second Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ‘made a ...”

“... is that it’s both romantic and conventional, Pearson Park was a garret.15 April, Lady Thatcher back on the scene, lecturing the world about Bosnia with ‘Bomb the Serbs’ her solution. She doesn’t begin by saying, as any fair-minded person would. ‘I admit I supported the Serbs to start with,’ Just hoping no one will remember that (and ...”

“... object a shapeless mass. Levin talking about Solzhenitsyn doesn’t sound very different from Mrs Thatcher talking about Solzhenitskyn, the mysterious Russian writer whose name was so memorably invoked in a Conservative Party Political Broadcast. In other words, he sounds as if he is speaking in the debating chamber. The difference between making debating ...”